After JFK Was Shot

To Refresh His Memory, Columnist Ralph Gardner Jr. Called an Old Classmate

By

Ralph Gardner Jr.

Nov. 20, 2013 9:34 p.m. ET

My most enduring memory of John F. Kennedy's assassination was the excitement I felt at being able to break the news to my mother. That's not the noblest reaction to the murder of a president. Then again, I was only 10.

I remember being sent home from school early on that Friday and being greeted at our front door by Agnes Arnold, our housekeeper. I told her the news and she burst into tears. Then I told my mother and remember the two of them crying together.

But that's all I remember, except for several days of uninterrupted TV viewing—nothing but the assassination and its aftermath playing on every station—culminating in President Kennedy's funeral that Monday.

I was at school when we learned that JFK had been shot. But I have no recollection of how we found out. So I contacted John Elstad, an old classmate who I've known since kindergarten, and the hands-down smartest kid in our class. I figured if anybody remembered, it would be John, these days an attorney in Boston.

ENLARGE

Jacqueline Kennedy being comforted by a priest.
CSU Archives/Everett Collection

"We were in our fifth grade classroom with Mr. Kenny," he responded by email, referring to our homeroom teacher. "Someone came to the door and had a very serious conversation with Mr. Kenny. Then, Mr. Kenny told us the President had been shot. He was either crying, obviously holding back tears or at least deeply disturbed."

John added another recollection: "I had seen JFK in an open car in a motorcade some months or maybe a year before. I was standing in the crowd at the corner of 43rd Street and Second Avenue." John lived in Tudor City. "He kind of glowed. I think he was wearing make-up for a TV appearance."

Or maybe he actually glowed. That's the impression one gets watching archival footage of the president. Someone recently sent me "Letters to Jackie," a new film based on some of the 800,000 condolence notes Mrs. Kennedy received. You might think an epistolary documentary wouldn't be that riveting. But the emotions of the letter writers are so raw; and the letters are read by celebrities such as Laura Linney, Anne Hathaway, Chris Cooper, Kirsten Dunst and Allison Janney over what appear to be Kennedy home movies and news footage of their arrival in Dallas that morning. It's impossible not to be swept up by the family's easy-going glamour.

I'm not a big believer in the paranormal. But Jack and Jackie, Caroline and John Jr. do, indeed, appear to have glowed.

John Elstad wasn't my only authoritative source. There's also my mother. Her memory isn't any better than mine. Fortunately, she kept a diary. I pulled it off a high shelf earlier this week.

Ironically, there's a reference to Mrs. Kennedy in my mother's entry for Nov. 21, the day before the assassination. She's talking about fighting with the super of her building over something having to do with the electrical outlets. "I thought to myself if it were Jackie Kennedy I wouldn't have all these aggravations," she wrote. "I thought how easy everything must be for her and I must say, I felt a little envious."

That envy would vanish the next day. She was still dealing with the electrical outlets when my younger brother Johnny and I returned from school "and told me that President Kennedy was dead, that he had been shot! I thought that they were kidding. So Ralphie told me to turn on the television."

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She details the breaking-news bulletins: that Texas Gov. John Connally had also been shot; that three shots were fired, the first probably killing the president; that Kennedy's doctors tried artificial heart massage; that a policeman had also been shot and killed; and that Vice President Johnson took the oath of office at 2:30 p.m.

"For a minute I suspected him [Johnson] or Governor Rockefeller to be behind it," she wrote. (I'd heard conspiracy theories involving LBJ, but not regarding New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.) "But that's a crazy thought. I felt heartbroken and started crying every few minutes….I even named Johnny for him because I was so crazy about him."

What distinguishes my mother's reaction to the assassination wasn't that it was so different than anybody else's, but probably that it was so similar. It's become a cliché that the Kennedy assassination marked the nation's collective loss of innocence. But you can hear it in my mother's words. "I feel as if someone very, very close to me had died," she wrote.

"I feel as if this were the end of everything, as if nothing really mattered anymore," she continued the next day. "I felt that with the Kennedy Administration the United States was the leader, not only in world power and so on but also in matters of welfare, civilization and culture."

That Sunday marked another day of nonstop TV watching. "There was one moment where Mrs. Kennedy and Caroline knelt by the flag-draped coffin and kissed the flag on it that was terribly moving," my mother reported, referring to the president's body lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda. "Mrs. Kennedy's behavior is unbelievable. It's what mother always says, that a civilized person has to control oneself. Mrs. Kennedy's breeding shows all over."

The funeral was the following day, my mother impressed by the many world leaders who attended—among them President de Gaulle of France, Prince Philip, King Baudouin of Belgium, Emperor Haile Selassie and Queen Frederica of Greece. I remember that part, too, especially the 6-foot-4-inch de Gaulle's head bobbing above the crowd of dignitaries as they walked up Connecticut Avenue toward the funeral service.

"I had to stop watching a few times because I started to cry," my mother wrote. "What a shame that he is gone!"

But life continues. The last sentence of her entry on that Monday 50 years ago had nothing to do with JFK or the assassination. "The painters started painting our apartment today," she wrote.

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